


Self Worth

by ClockworkQuill



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek - Various Authors, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Alternate Universe - Book/Movie Fusion, Character Study, Episode Related, Not Beta Read, Other Additional Tags to Be Added
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-24
Updated: 2018-01-24
Packaged: 2019-03-09 02:56:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13472250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ClockworkQuill/pseuds/ClockworkQuill
Summary: Character Study following Jadzia/ Dax through DS9, working on bringing together show cannon and bookverse, especially where it concerns past hosts (read Tobin's problematic bookverse existance). Also headcannons. Because headcannons.





	Self Worth

**Author's Note:**

> Okay so because I can't focus on just one project at a time, NEW FIC. Again. Been actually sitting on this prologue for a while, because I wasn't sure if i wanted to re-write it to fit with bookverse canon for Jadzia's past the few years before going to DS9. I might still do that, but I'm almost done with the Emmissary chapter so I decided to just live with this for now. The basic timeline of Jadzia being rejected, reapplying and being joined to Dax I believe are cannon correct, but everything else here, not so much.
> 
> Whatever. Deal with it.
> 
> If I decide to re-write it I'll update.
> 
> Not beta read, so might be some icky tense changes or typos. Feel free to point those out so I can fix.

It all came crashing down around Jadzia Idaris. Curzon Dax had recommended she be ejected from the program. That she not be joined. He had claimed she didn’t have a purpose, when all her life she had had one. Just one. Be joined. Be the first in her family, the only one in her family to be joined. She had been working for it as long as she could remember. All her life Jadzia had dedicated herself to her studies, preparing for the program, going through it.

Now he says she doesn’t have a purpose, and suddenly she doesn’t. Jadzia has never before felt so lost.

They have shore leave the night after her starship drops Curzon off at Starbase 51. She had tried for so long to be the perfect Trill, the best Trill she could. The best student, the best scientist, the best candidate for joining. She had always been the top of her class. She didn’t care anymore. What more did she have to live for? She didn’t have a purpose. Curzon had taken care of that. Everything she had worked for was gone. She wasn’t worthy, she wasn’t worthy. What was the point of being the best Trill now?

So Jadzia did something she had never done before. She goes to a bar, a dive really, and she wonders why the Federation, why Starfleet, would allow such a bar in one of their stations. She starts ordering drinks. First a synthale. It’s disgusting. And it seems a waste to drink such a thing if it won’t even get her drunk, which honestly was what she was looking for right now. So she orders some other ale, something with real alcohol, Aldorian. It still tastes disgusting, but by the end of the frothy pint she feels a little disconnected, and its nice. So next she tries some wine. A white. She likes it better than the ale but the sweetness of it cuts at her tongue. Next she tries a red wine. A Malbec, whatever that meant. She almost likes it, but not quite. More than the others. She wonders if that might be the alcohol.

She has never been intoxicated before. It’s interesting, and a little scary. Her thoughts drift and spin and Jadzia cannot focus on much of anything. She doesn’t want to focus on much of anything.

Someone sits next to her at the bar at some point during that white wine and they start chatting. Later, Jadzia cannot remember whether they were a man or a woman, or what they looked like at all. She has the sneaking suspicion they were blue, though she cannot be certain. It’s her first time with someone, first time going beyond handholding and somewhat chaste kisses. All her relationships before had been short, sweet, and quickly forgotten in the wake of furthering her studies.

But this wasn’t a relationship. She couldn’t even call it a fling. She wasn’t sure she would even call their frenzied, drunk fucking in the bar bathroom a one night stand. It was her first time having sex, her first time really kissing, and Jadzia barely remembers it. Random details remain, the feeling of flesh pressing against hers, their torso felt slick with sweat against her hands, burned underneath her hands.  
She had her first hangover the next morning. She reported back to Starfleet the next morning with a pounding headache and a dull and satisfying twinge in her gut when she moved her legs just right. It wasn’t horrible, but it wasn’t what a Trill was supposed to do. They weren’t supposed to be susceptible to those kinds of temptations. She tried not to think about that night afterwards.

Instead of just returning to her work with her normal quiet dedication she threw herself at her research, be it in the labs or away parties or some station. Striving to prove herself, find her purpose in each moment, in each action. If she couldn’t be worthy of being a host at least she would be worthy of this position in starfleet, newly a Lieutenant JG. If she couldn’t be worthy of what she had wanted, she’d do everything she could in this life alone.

She made friends. She really hadn’t known how to make friends, but some other science officers asked if she wanted to join them in recreation after shift so for once she said yes. She discovered she hated synthahol but she drank it anyways as they all told their stories of all sort of things they had experienced, they had gotten into and suddenly it clicked.

Jadzia didn’t just want to achieve, she wanted to experience, she wanted to be. She wanted stories to tell, to be the one telling the stories, not  
the one quietly laughing, not the one shrugging, demuring, when others asked “What about you Jadzia?”

She’d rediscover herself, she was rediscovering herself. She would be better, she would be everything, do everything she could, experience everything she could.

She wanted to be joined. It had only been a few months and that still ached deep in her soul. On the worse days she thought the drinking, the socializing, the occasional fucking, the throwing herself into her work was all to cover that ache, that emptiness. Maybe it was. Even now that’s the only thing she wanted. 

Everything now she did out of spite and it hits her one day, laughing and drinking with some senior officers, if she would do all this to prove Curzon wrong, to prove to Curzon - to herself - that she had purpose, why not go one step further?

She applied to rejoin the program. She wasn’t sure if it was a whim or a need. She wanted it more than anything. Some days it was all she could think about. All she had ever wanted was to be joined. She had only ever worked for two things up until Curzon, Starfleet and joining. She would be the first Idaris to lose that name, to become joined. All her life she had put everything aside just to work towards that. No purpose. No purpose without that. 

She never thought they would accept. No one had ever been accepted back into the program. She wasn’t sure anyone else had tried.

Jadzia threw herself into the program, like she had been throwing herself headlong into anything, into everything since Curzon, since that last trip to Trill. Since that day her world fell apart. This she wanted, this she would get. This she would get every experience out of she could manage. That’s what joining was all about right? New experiences? 

Jadzia made a habit of trying new things. Every night she would try a new drink, some new food, if she was on planet she would visit a new bar or new restaurant. Every day she would talk to at least one new person. Almost as often as not she would sleep with some new person. She had closed herself off so much before all this, had limited herself so much. She wanted to discover herself. What she liked, what she hated.  
She found she liked lost things, discarded things. It reminded her of why she had studied exoarchaeology, uncovering things there-to-fore undiscovered. She liked collecting lost composers perhaps the most. That had started long before this, slowly over the years studying and closing herself off. She had always loved to study mostly forgotten music, but now she threw herself at it with a passion she hadn’t shown before.

On the bad days it all still felt more like running away from the shy girl without purpose Curzon thought so worthless, so undeserving. That still haunted her, when she was alone. He had taken everything she had worked for away. She would show him, she had to remind herself. She would be worthy. She would be worthy.

She threw everything she had at the program, at her research, at socializing and flirting. Not so much at relationships. Trill were supposed to be above that sort of thing but more importantly she wasn’t ready. Maybe someday. Maybe if she was worth it some day. She wonders what Curzon saw in her, what it was he found lacking. She wonders if others see it too. 

It’s been three years, and not much has changed, even though everything has. She’s a full blown - if still quite junior - lieutenant now. She’s cooled down a bit, and the wildness of her post-Curzon frenzy has gone from a boil to a simmer. She is just as determined to be the best, in her passion has learned that the best doesn’t have to be the ideal. No one sees the doubts that still race through her, no one sees the shy girl of before in this new, passionate, flirty, confident young woman. Even if every time she looks in the mirror she wonders what it is she is missing.  
It’s been three years and the Commission says “Yes, you are good enough,” and it is both a relief and a disappointment. That isn’t the approval she wants, after these three years it isn’t their rejection that rings through her head, that snatches away the joy she has learned to have. She hears Dax is ill and she knows Curzon is old and she takes a chance. She asks to be the next Dax. She isn’t sure if she does it out of spite or because she wants to show Curzon, ‘look, I heard you, I found purpose’ but it doesn’t matter. Not like Curzon would ever agree.

But he does. He says yes and Jadzia is about to be Jadzia Dax, not Jadzia Idaris. And once more her world is turned upside down because of Curzon Dax. Once he took away everything she had ever wanted, everything she had ever worked for. And now he was handing that very thing he had once snatched away from her and for the life of her Jadzia could not understand why. Why is she suddenly worthy? What changed? She doesn’t feel so different now, she’s still just Jadzia. Just now -she’s Jadzia in everything she does, not just in her own head.

Jadzia comes back to Trill for the first time since her leave to reapply for the program. It’s only the third time she’s been there since leaving at 17 to join Starfleet, to study at Starfleet academy. It feels strange now, she doesn’t feel like she belongs. She isn’t the perfect Trill she had tried so hard to be. And yet suddenly she’s supposed to be worthy of being joined? Of being Dax no less? She has trouble believing it’s real. It doesn’t feel real.

And then she is Dax. She is Jadzia Dax. And it is strange because things are a bit different then they were before. She finds herself fascinated with all things Klingon, and it doesn’t even seem strange at first. She just tries out a new restaurant and the flavor of the day is Klingon and it isn’t until she wakes up hungover the next morning she realized she had known walking into the restaurant what she wanted to order, what gagh she would like, what vintage of bloodwine. She decided she didn’t care. If this is what Curzon had given her than so be it, she would enjoy it.  
It took her six months to realize she was walking differently, hands clasped behind her back. She wasn’t actually completely sure when that started, so maybe she just did it on her own, maybe it wasn’t some habit of a former host, she tries to tell herself.

It takes her three weeks and a heated argument with an engineering ensign for her to realize her knowledge of warp drive theory is new. It didn’t take her much to realize that had come from Tobin. She had known some before, had touched on it while studying astrophysics, but she had never had much of a grasp on it before now.

And really, if she went a little more for the loud and raucous parties and bars then she had before, it really wasn’t that much of a difference was it? It wasn’t new, at least not to this recent version of her, just perhaps the preference was. 

The gambling admittedly was definitely new and almost certainly Curzon. Tongo was his favorite, and it had become hers too. Every shore leave she managed to track down a group of Ferengi to play with was a massive success.

Jadzia Dax could not sit still. She couldn’t tell how much of the restlessness was just itching to try new things, itching to keep doing, to keep doing to keep proving herself worthy. But perhaps it is a bit of the Emony in her, the gymnast that never stopped moving. Perhaps it is a bit of Curzon. It is probably Curzon that pulls her towards taking up Klingon calisthenics and martial arts. Jadzia tells herself it isn’t. But the Bat’leth brings her a piece she isn’t sure she has ever known before, either as Jadzia or as Dax.

And of course she still throws herself into her work and she even loves it most days. It isn’t a fight to be worthy when she is out there buried in her experiments or parsing through data. She has been Jadzia Dax two years when Starfleet hands her a promotion to science officer on a space station. 

She doesn’t know whether she should take the assignment or not. She wants it. She’s tired of being on a ship. A space station sounds perfect. The job - science officer - sounds amazing. She wants it so much.

But the CO is, or would likely be, one Benjamin Sisko. And Curzon knew Benjamin. Curzon knew Benjamin for 20 years, had mentored him, fought with him - kept him out of fights too. Trill were warned against reassociation, becoming close to people previous hosts had known. It’s all about gaining new experiences. But she wants this job. The astrophysics reports coming out of the station are fascinating, there are even opportunities for studies involving her background in exoarchaeology recovering all Bajor had lost in the occupation. It was on a completely different side of the Alpha Quadrant, far away from the Beta Quadrant Tobin had spent so much time in. Far away from any of the places Emony had competed. Far away from Trill where Lela and Audrid has spent most their lives. Torias Dax never even left Trill for long, though Torias had spent plenty of battle time away from Trill before joining. Even Curzon hadn’t spent much time out that way. It would be weird though, dealing with someone she knew before, that Curzon had known. 

But their positions would be so different, and it wasn’t as if platonic reassociation was forbidden. And for the first time in Dax’s life the symbionts existence was almost common knowledge, not some grand Trill secret. (Not that others hadn’t known that about Dax. Tobin and Curzon spent too much time around long-lived Vulcans of the S’chn T’gai line to have not been found out. Both Skon and Sarek knew the truth of Curzon and Tobin’s connection. And Spock she had met as Tobin, Emony and Curzon, it would surprise Jadzia more if the Vulcan did not at least suspect the connection.) She wouldn’t even have to hide the fact that she was still Dax, still the Trill that had known Ben all those years. She wanted it.

Besides, It would be good to see an old friend. Dax had worried about him these last few years, since Jennifer’s death. She knew it had hit him hard. She knew what losing a spouse could do to someone. Audrid had lost her Jayvid and it had almost ruined her. And Vod being lost too? It had been such a blow. At least if Vod had gone on, there would be part of him living on, like part of Audrid still lived within Dax. But that was so different. So different. Audrid was the one who chose to have Vod terminated, after the parasite corrupted him. Benjamin never wanted to loose his Jennifer. Jadzia shook her head, trying to clear away the thoughts. It was still hard sometimes to not get caught up in the memories of old hosts. Especially where strong emotions were concerned. 

She typed out a quick reply to starfleet HQ. She took the job.

**Author's Note:**

> Wheee so there we go. Next update goes through The Emmissary. I'm using both the episode and the novelization as source material there. I'm almost done, but not sure when it's going up yet.
> 
> Feedback and kudos much appreciated. Like feedback gives me life. And helps me keep writing.


End file.
